sep200229

The worrying thing at the moment is that history – including tradition – is being invented in vast quantities. In the past 30 years there’s been an explosion of heritage sites and historical museums. On top of this, particularly since the end of communism, there’s been the foundation of new states which need to invent histories to show how important they are. And the way you do this is that you invent or collect yourself a past.

aug20107

What do you see as the major developments in world history since then?

I see five main changes. First, the shift of the economic centre of the world from the North Atlantic to South and East Asia. This was beginning in Japan in the seventies and eighties, but the rise of China from the nineties has made a real difference. Secondly, of course, the worldwide crisis of capitalism, which we had been predicting, but which nevertheless took a long time to occur. Third, the clamorous failure of the US attempt at a solo world hegemony after 2001—and it has very visibly failed. Fourth, the emergence of the new bloc of developing countries as a political entity—the BRICs—had not taken place when I wrote Age of Extremes. And fifth, the erosion and systematic weakening of the authority of states: of national states within their territories, and in large parts of the world, of any kind of effective state authority.

apr201219

the 20th century can only be understood fully by those who became historians because they lived through it and shared its basic passion: namely the belief that politics was the key to our truths as well as our myths.

okt20127

In recent decades, as the appetite of historians to account for change in the long term has diminished, Eric’s contribution has appeared all the more distinctive and magnificent. The degree of austerity, the refusal of sentimentality, all of which I had found a little off-putting when a student, now appear among his great strengths as a historian. As he acknowledged in his 1993 Creighton lecture, as a communist he was on the losing side of history. Movingly, he tried to recuperate as a historian what had been lost politically. Winners, he suggested, rarely asked the interesting questions. How could they? Their victory so often seemed right or inevitable or both. […]